


Marchland

by orphan_account



Category: Gangsta. (Manga)
Genre: Character Study, Deaf Character, Developing Relationship, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Past Child Abuse, Prostitution, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-14
Updated: 2015-05-14
Packaged: 2018-03-30 12:00:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3936010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her presence is an inescapable, aggravating constant (for how long?) and he wants it gone (because he's old enough to know better now).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Marchland

He sees her in passing a couple times, and takes note of her like he takes note of all the small anomalies around town. She looks to be in her twenties—a lot older than most of the girls just starting out—and despite her drug-clouded eyes and the weary slump to her shoulders, she looks healthy in a way that marks her as foreign. She's clearly out of place with her glowing dark skin and generous curves, and he can't help but wonder how someone like her has managed to end up in this godforsaken shithole.  
  
Then Worick has the brilliant idea that they should take her in, and Nicolas doesn't know what he's thinking. Maybe it's a solidarity thing. (For as long as Worick has been working, he's been insisting he has it easier than the women, that he likes fucking and the money is a nice bonus, that he's not some hundred-pound girl who can't take a punch or two—and what's a punch or two more, anyway; at least when it's a client, he knows it's nothing personal. For all Nicolas knows, all of that is even true these days. But he's not an idiot, and he knows they both remember all too well the results of the one and only time Worick went complaining to him.)  
  
And so the woman stays, filling their apartment with soft smiles and tentative touches, home-cooked meals and the barely perceptible pitter-patter of small feet on the floorboards. Her presence is an inescapable, aggravating constant (for how long?) and he wants it gone (because he's old enough to know better now).  
  
He assumes, at first, that Worick wants her, but the weeks pass and all they ever seem to do is talk, alternating between bickering and having what Nicolas assumes are long heart-to-hearts in the office, on the stairs of their building, at the kitchen table. Worick has apparently decided she's going to be their assistant of sorts, which is how she ends up accompanying him on some of their safer, more boring jobs. He ignores her as much as he can, as much as it's possible to ignore a woman like her. He doesn't think he's doing a very good job of it.  
  
He catches her with their sign language dictionary sometimes, sitting on the couch or by the phone in the office, her long fingers curling gracefully if a bit tentatively around the unfamiliar shapes. It makes him inexplicably angry in a way Nina's similar attempts never have.  
  
_Stop messing around, you're just wasting your time_ , he tells her one night after he catches her with the book yet again. If it was Nina sitting there in her place, he would be careful to make his movements slow, maybe even fingerspell some of the words for her. Or maybe—probably—he would just let her be. But she's not Nina, and his hands slash through the word signs with the same furious precision he applies to his swordplay.

She stares at him, looking positively gutted in a way that makes him think he might as well have just used his sword.  
  
He has the sudden, ridiculous urge to console her, to explain to her all the things she _still_ doesn't seem to understand; that he's not a man like she thinks but a parody of a human being living a wretched half-existence, that she's too pure for this place where the only people who can carve out a future of sorts are the ones who have no future at all.  
  
But he doesn't, because explaining it to her would mean talking to her, letting her _see_ him, and she would inevitably take it as an invitation he has no intention of extending. It's bad enough that Worick is stuck here, that Veronica is hardly sticking around at all, and it's all because this is what Nicolas does best, the _only_ thing he does well; he cripples the people he loves, drags them down to his own level of hell and sucks the life out of them like the monster his father knew him to be.  
  
He doesn't love her, not yet, but he's afraid it wouldn't take much.


End file.
